Wednesday, November 10, 2004

"Globalization" has a lot of critics these days. People who say
that it's a problem that third-world factories have poor safety
standards. People who say that they often subject their workers to
physical abuse. People who say that poor countries are being forced
to open their markets by exploitative first-world countries that keep
their own markets closed.

To this, proponents of globalization have one common answer: all
these critics, whatever they claim their motives are, are opponents of
"trade". Critics may say that they want to keep American
multinationals working through proxies from herding desperate workers
into firetrap factories, but the globalizer knows that
what they
really want to do is reduce the size of particular
aggregate international money flows.

In earlier times, Britain fought a war to get the
Chinese to accept free trade in opium, which the Chinese emperors had
restricted because for some strange reason -- and who among us truly
understands the ways of the mysterious East? -- they didn't want their
subjects turning into drug-crazed zombies. I'm sure the pro-globalizers
of the time were around to say that critics of this particular British
policy weren't so much anti-addiction, as anti-trade.

Well, here's an interesting
test case. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has discovered that traditional
bespoke tailors in India are selling their wares to Americans on Ebay.
This is something that a genuinely anti-trade person would oppose, but that I expect most "anti-trade" people are sure to endorse. As, I
expect, would the globalizers, unless they're absolutely desperate to
expose themselves as pro-firetrap.